You Can't POP Your Cherry! (HYMEN 101)

There's Something Rotten in Hogsmeade

Snowden-esque scandals at the Ministry of Magic (and Ron and Hermione got a divorce).

Editor's Note: After this weekend's shocking news that J.K. Rowling thought it was a mistake to have Hermione end up with Ron in the Harry Potter books, Dan Drezner begged us to publish this excerpt from his forthcoming fanfic novel, Eat, Cast, Love. We have reluctantly acceded to his request.

It was in the middle of the "Why Women Wizards Can't Have It All" seminar that Hermione Granger (it had been Hermione Weasley for nearly 20 years, but she'd opted for her maiden name after the divorce) felt a strong hankering for the libations at The Three Broomsticks. Six months ago, when she'd signed up, the idea of attending these seminars at her 25th Hogwarts reunion sounded wonderful. They certainly seemed like they would come as a welcome respite from her day job at a "special unit" of the Ministry of Magic. 

That was the old Hermione, though... the one who believed she'd married the right man. The past six months had been more disorienting than a portkey trip. Ron had been talking about "finding himself" for a while. When Weasley's Wizard Wheezes had their IPO and George's bank accounts at Gringotts swelled, Ron went into a tailspin. He started talking more about his glory days playing Quidditch and trying on his old Gryffindor uniform. One day he just disapparated without a word, without a note. He'd now been gone for longer than when they were searching for the Hallows. Hermione had gone ahead and filed for divorce, but she felt just as uncertain about the future now as she had then.  

In those moments when she did not want to curse Ron into a stint at Azkaban, Hermione acknowledged that Ron was only partly responsible for their drifting apart. The kids had been a typical stressor, but it was her Auror job at the Ministry of Magic that had become a very atypical source of strain. When Hermione took herUnbreakable Vow to join the new MAGICOM unit, she thought it would be an opportunity to do well and to do good. Foiling threats and plots to the world of wizards was exactly what she wanted to do after all of her kids started Hogwarts. Only after she realized MAGICOM's true goals did the Unbreakable Vow feel like a straightjacket. Ron would ask her to talk about it, and she literally could not.    

Losing Ron was bad enough... but coping with the media firestorm that followed their split was worse than the Cruciatus curse. Of course Rita Skeeter published a tawdry story in the Daily Prophetabout their separation. The only fact Skeeter got right in that story was Ron's disapparation.

The rest of it was filled out with baseless speculation that Ron had run away withGabrielle Delacour and that, absurdly, Hermione was seeking comfort in the arms of Harry Potter.

The rest of it was filled out with baseless speculation that Ron had run away with Gabrielle Delacour and that, absurdly, Hermione was seeking comfort in the arms of Harry Potter. That sort of tripe she could deal with. After all, she'd been dealing with it since their fourth year at Hogwarts when the school famously hosted the Triwizard Tournament. But, it was when Luna Lovegood published the "Weasley Letters" in the Quibbler that things got really bad. Someone on Lovegood's staff had gotten a hold of the letters Ron had written to his family over the years, and published them on the online version of the Quibbler (now called thelovegoodletters.com). Luna pulled them once she heard about it, and blamed the mess on an intern, but the damage was done. Ron's misspelled, grammatically foul prose nevertheless painted an unflattering picture of Hermione: always harping on him to take a more active role in the children's lives, long nights she had to spend at work, etc. After a decade of striving, of "leaning in" with her wand at the Ministry of Magic, Hermione found herself treated as a cliché by friends and enemies alike in the mainstream wizard media.

The reunion itself proved to be as painful as she'd feared. Out of loyalty to Ginny, Harry had decided not to come. Around every corner of Hogwarts, she could hear the whisperings: "Did you hear about them?" and "Who has custody of the children?" and "No, I hear the Potters went to America for the year to get away from the mess." Indeed, while most classmates at least feigned sympathy, quite a few blamed her for Harry Potter's absence. The only people being nice to her were her old classmates who had been Slytherins. Draco Malfoy, clearly overjoyed at not having to deal with either Harry or Ron, had even put his arm around Hermione and suggested she be granted honorary Slytherin House membership. When Dolores Umbridgestarted explaining that women simply couldn't attain both high rank and happiness at home that Hermione knew she had to make a beeline for Hogsmeade. 

By her fifth butterbeer, Hermione had lapsed into total self-pity.

By her fifth butterbeer, Hermione had lapsed into total self-pity. How did the valedictorian of her Hogwarts class wind up a separated mother of two, stuck in a horrible, officious job, with nary a fun spell cast in nearly a year? As much as she wished otherwise, the answer was not to be found at the bottom of her frosted butterbeer mug. Clearly, she'd made some wrong choices in her life. Worse, the wrong choices at home were causing her to procrastinate the hard choices she was putting off at work.

"Hermione? Is that you? You haven't aged a day!"

She looked up to see Neville Longbottom, now Professor of Herbology at Hogwarts, gazing down at her with a kindly face.  

"Neville! How are you doing?! Can I buy you a drink?" she blurted out before realizing that he already had a glass of pumpkin juice.

"How about I buy you a drink instead?" He said. "Perhaps some tea?"   

Within minutes, they had moved past the awkward pleasantries to some actual conversation.  Actually, Hermione did most of the talking. 

"What did I ever see in him? Sure, he could be decent at times, but we're not exactly talking about a real go-getter, you know what I mean? He would be happy about every promotion I got at work, or any prize the kids won, but he was still so detached. The only time he got really animated was talking about Quidditch... or Harry. Seriously, I felt like I was married to a Judd Apatow character."

Neville spit out his pumpkin juice, and Hermione laughed for the first time in weeks. But her smile quickly faded. The catharsis of talking about her personal life had merely exposed the other problems that had weighed on her for months. 

She looked at Neville intently, feeling as sober as she had ever felt in her life. "I'm an Auror, Neville, but at this point, I feel like my full-time job is being a keeper of secrets, Neville. You have no idea what the Ministry of Magic's surveillance capabilities really are. I can't tell you the really bad stuff -- Unbreakable Vow and all -- but even the minor stuff is bad. Do you know they're spying on Muggles?!" 

"But that's not allowed!" Neville said, looking aghast. "We have to do something!!"

Hermione hadn't seen him that passionate since the Battle of Hogwarts. She'd never realized how tall Neville was before....

TO BE CONTINUED.....

Are You Really Anonymous on Snapchat? A Closer Look at Social Media Security

Want to go ghost hunting? Sign up for Snapchat.

The trendy photo-sharing service has recently implemented a feature that makes incoming users pick out its trademark white phantom from a set of nine pictures, before they’re allowed to join the network. This new measure comes in the wake of last month’s disastrous security breach for the social network.

In early January, hackers were able to access the usernames and telephone numbers of 4.6 million Snapchat users (including, apparently, the CEO himself). Much of this private information was then made accessible online, for anyone to see. This follows on the heels of discoveries that, contrary to claims, photos and videos sent via Snapchat are in fact stored locally on users’ phones and never completely destroyed.

For Snapchat’s detractors, all of this is timely comeuppance for the brash young network, fresh off turning down a $3-billion offer from Facebook. For companies that find themselves committing more and more resources to social media, however, this should also be a sobering wake-up call: Security and social media rarely go hand-in-hand.

In the last year, businesses have adopted social media in record numbers. 77 percent of the Fortune 500 now have active Twitter accounts and 70 percent maintain a Facebook Page, according to a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth study. Perhaps most eye-opening, 90 percent of small businesses now report using social media. But behind the enthusiasm for Twitter, Facebook and other networks is a sobering truth. Many companies, including some of the planet’s largest enterprises, are underestimating the risks they’re exposed to on social media.

There are, of course, the obvious ones. Twitter is public: Content posted can be seen by anyone and can never really be put back in the box once sent. Start a Facebook Page, by the same token, and your company “wall” is as vulnerable to vandalism in the form of vicious or off-color comments as any back alley.

Then, there are more insidious threats, internal and external. Organizations from the Red Cross to KitchenAid have been shamed by employees—either accidentally or intentionally—posting comprising tidbits on corporate social channels. Meanwhile, malicious hackers have made short work of some of the biggest consumer brands on social media, co-opting feeds from the likes of McDonalds, the AP and more. For companies in highly regulated industries—like finance or pharmaceuticals—the challenges are even greater. Strict communication rules can make compliance on fast-paced, informal social channels a legal nightmare.

Yet, for some companies, opting out of social media is no longer a viable option. According to a recent Nielsen survey, nearly half of all U.S. consumers now turn to social media for information from brands and businesses about their products and services. At the same time, companies able to navigate the shoals and use social media to its potential stand to unlock some $1.3 trillion in value in the years ahead, McKinsey reports. In many cases, there’s too much at stake to turn back.

Security technology plays catch up

Slowly, however, social media technology is catching up and starting to fill in the security gap. Over the last several years, software systems called social relationship platforms have emerged, offering companies ways to take at least some of the risks out of social media. Big software—like Adobe and Salesforce, among others—all have their versions, though dedicated vendors focused exclusively on social media (my company is one of these) have also emerged on the scene.

At their most basic level, all of these platforms force companies to consolidate and organize their social media presence. According to an Altimeter study, the typical enterprise has 178 Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts associated with it—some official, others started informally by employees. Security risks here range from lost passwords and hacked accounts to rogue employees sounding off and confused customers who mistake satellite accounts for the real thing.

The standard social relationship platform centralizes these accounts in one software program—a kind of master dashboard for viewing and using all social channels. Access to accounts can then be regulated by a central administrator. At the same time, different permission levels can be extended to different employees, enabling, for instance, junior staff to draft messages and managers to approve them. Alerts for unauthorized access and special security features also make it considerably harder (but not impossible) for hackers to hijack company accounts.

The most secure platforms also offer an array of behind-the-scenes services from live support teams. Some vendors assist with audits to identify a client’s social media channels—both the real ones and knock-offs—then consolidate and map the legitimate accounts. Others provide crisis simulations to ready employees should a PR disaster ever go viral on Twitter or Facebook.

Increasingly, however, the real power of these systems lies in automation. A major consumer brand like Coca-Cola, for instance, may get tens of thousands of social comments everyday on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other channels. Many social relationship platform will have features to automatically weed out offensive or irrelevant content, as well as the increasing amounts of spam and malware distributed on social channels. Custom filters can even be set up to identify and eliminate comments containing flagged keywords, phrases or images.

The most robust of these platforms also have real-time monitoring functions, which automatically run messages posted by employees through a series of tests to ensure compliance with industry regulations. This kind of constant, background analysis is often critical in sensitive sectors like banking or securities, where violating FINRA or SEC rules on communications—even on social channels—can trigger heavy fines.

As for Snapchat, as a result of last month’s breach, members of the famously discrete network were besieged by spam—of the intimate variety. A steady stream of messages featuring topless women and ads for male enhancement, not to mention fake rolexes and diet pills, has invaded users’ phones, prompting many to cry foul over the network’s repeated violations of trust. Meanwhile, its new verification system has already been called out as flimsy after a hacker allegedly cracked the code in just 30 minutes.

The moral of the story: For companies for whom social media is more than a one-night stand, the path forward it seems isn’t anonymity or privacy but precisely the opposite—transparency and vigilance.